1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a method of providing access to presence information. ‘Presence’ information refers to private user data which gives information and hints about a user's current state, including location, availability and mood. The term ‘wireless information device’ used in this patent specification should be expansively construed to cover any kind of device with one or two way communications capabilities and includes without limitation radio telephones, smart phones, communicators, personal computers, computers and application specific devices. It includes devices able to communicate in any manner over any kind of network, such as GSM or UMTS mobile radio, Bluetooth™, Internet etc.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Current generation wired and wireless telephones can indicate to a caller the status of a call recipient in only crude and potentially ambiguous terms: for example, when a caller makes a voice call, he or she might receive one of five different responses: (a) the desired call recipient answers; (b) there is no answer; (c) there is an engaged tone; (d) the call gets put through to a prerecorded voice mail message or (e) the call gets diverted to someone else. If the intended call recipient does not actually answer the call, then the caller has no idea why the call was not answered: for example, is the intended recipient in fact there but too busy to answer? Could a different number have been dialled to connect successfully?
Conventional so-called ‘Presence’ systems are the subject of considerable interest at present and partly solve the above problems. The intent of Presence systems is to show the status of the prospective call recipient to a calling party ahead of the caller making the call—for example, giving information about whether the intended call recipient is busy, in a meeting, contactable on a mobile phone or land line, giving hints about the way the call recipient would prefer to be contacted (voice, SMS etc). Reference may be made to RFC 2778 ‘A Model for Presence and Instant Messaging’ February 2000, The Internet Society.
Presence information will typically be stored on one or more servers controlled by a wireless operator, people can post their Presence information onto these servers directly from their own wireless information devices; some kinds of Presence information may also be determined automatically, such as the location of the device. Someone seeking Presence information relating to (or ‘owned’) by another can access these servers. Peer to peer variants are also possible, with an individual storing his or her Presence information on his or her own wireless information device, which can give access to that information to other wireless information device or servers that wish to pull down this information. Various kinds of access control to different kinds of information can be provided, so that a user might give access to certain Presence information only to a defined group of friends or family; for example, location information might be available only to persons the user has classified as dose friends, whereas availability information might be accessed by a broader group. Reference may be made to PCT/GB01/03784 filed by the present applicant, which describes a comprehensive Presence architecture and is incorporated by reference into this disclosure. Further reference may also be made to PCT/GB01/03804 again filed by Symbian Limited, which discloses an extensible database architecture suitable for the fast and efficient deployment of the present invention and is again incorporated by reference into this disclosure.
Despite a user's ability to limit access to his/her own Presence data to defined users and classes of users, one of the disadvantages of Presence systems is the perceived lack of control that the user has over his Presence information. That lack of control is clearly greater where a user has not implemented any of the conventional access control features described above, perhaps because doing so is seen as complicated, or has made some Presence information ‘public’ and hence can be accessed by anyone (this might include basic availability information).